At McCarthy, our 100% employee-owned construction company, we have been in business for almost 160 years. We have grown from a small lumber company founded in 1864 into one of the largest and most diversified commercial construction companies in the U.S. That kind of timeline requires that a company reinvent itself constantly, and that kind of growth requires an understanding of how to scale. But these are not lessons we learned just once. As new problems present themselves and as the world evolves and changes, we are required to repeatedly tackle innovation and scaling challenges. Today, the pace of change is almost dizzying, but like in the past, a challenge – this one having to do with scale – served as the impetus for our recent foray into the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The genesis of our AI tool began with a business problem. Around two and a half years ago, a group of forward-thinking team members at McCarthy set out to improve the design solutions for our renewable energy projects, primarily in the solar and battery storage sector. The demand for renewable energy installations was growing fast, but they realized that adding more human resources to address the demand wasn’t a sustainable solution. In a highly competitive job market, they saw we needed to find a way to scale operations efficiently.